INTRODUCTION

DISPATCHES FROM DYSTOPIA, dispatchesfromdystopia.net, which evolved during the past eight years from the less sharply focused "Outside Agitator's Notebook," has become precisely what this blog's new title and domain name describes. It is an ongoing anthology of reports, analyses, commentaries, photographs and other anti-Capitalist testimony from the Dystopia that Capitalism has made of our world. It's epicenter is the post-humanitarian United States of America: our species' self-inflicted Moron Nation and its empire of global-conquest malevolence, the de facto Fourth Reich, the true birthdate of which will eventually be recognized – if indeed our species somehow miraculously survives the present era – as 22 November 1963.
¶Dispatches thus chronicles our relentless subjugation by Capitalism as it (inevitably) reverts to its traditional might-makes-right savagery and – just as Capitalism previously transformed itself into Italian Fascism and German Nazism – as it now matures into a Nazism of uniquely USian form and content. By examining the details of what is occurring, DfD shows how ours is a Dystopia characterized as much by the mindlessness of Moron Nation's Zieg-Heil-equivalent chanting of “USA! USA! USA!” as by the brutality such chanting invariably celebrates – the genocidal, ultimately ecocidal atrocities the Capitalist Ruling Class perpetrates in the name of “profit,” “growth” and USian “Exceptionalism.”
¶Why “USian” rather than American? Because to call this exceptionally fascist empire “America” is to slander as fascists or Nazis all humanitarian-minded peoples of North and South America who valiantly and often fatally resist USiaNazi enslavement. And, yes, “humanitarian” versus “anti-humanitarian” are the only terms that adequately differentiate the two now eternally hostile subspecies into which Capitalism has finally divided Homo sapiens sapiens. On one side are those of us who cling to the so-called Golden Rule and its variants, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the ultimate form of which is Marxism's “from each according to ability, too each according to need.” On the other side are the moral imbeciles – Nazis, fascists, Ayn Rand disciples and all the other psychological zombies that are Capitalism's unique and uniquely apocalyptic spawn.
¶But what then is Capitalism? Though traditionally defined as economics, it is in fact the quintessential patriarchal ethos, the diabolical methodology of building a global empire by conquest and genocide both obvious and clandestine, with post-conquest world governance originally patterned after the despotic management of antebellum slave plantations. Capitalism is thus the forefather of fascism and Nazism, its only possible offspring. Behind its seductive cloak of euphemisms and Big Lies (“manifest destiny,” “easy credit,” “economic freedom,” “self-made man,” “entrepreneur,” “no down payment,” “rugged individualist,” “you too can be rich,” “free will,” etc. ad nauseam), Capitalism is the stench of burning flesh and rotting corpses; the shrieks of napalmed children; the despair of families evicted into the permanent degradation, filth, deadly danger of untreated disease and constant fear of enslavement by arrest or kidnapping that defines USian homelessness; the final agonies of maliciously abandoned patients condemned to death by the deliberately genocidal costs of health care.
¶Ultimately Capitalism is the boundless Evil of global dictatorship by the Christian white male One Percent, a tiny, ruthless cabal of Capitalist aristocrats for whom infinite greed is ultimate virtue and for whom the snuff-film sadism of class warfare provides the ultimate entertainment. Under Capitalism's Fukushima-deadly, Ayn Rand credo of serial-killer moral imbecility – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us – these obscenely wealthy despots now impose on us their increasingly overt paradigm of Nazi governance. Not that We the (formerly exempt) People should be surprised; the merciless regimen that is now ours is how the Capitalists have always tyrannized our sisters and brothers in America's First Nations, in the USian ghettos and in all the Capitalist victim realms abroad.
¶Moreover our plight is of our own making. We the People long ago surrendered to our Capitalist overlords. We submit to denial of health care that is everywhere else on this planet deemed a human right; we submit to enslavement by debt; to the outsourcing of our jobs; to bankruptcy; to foreclosure; to eviction and homelessness; to imprisonment in numbers hitherto unequaled in human history; and most of all to the biggest Big Lie of all – the suicidal delusion we somehow remain free despite the Capitalists' no-longer-deniable theft of our liberty and their snickering revocation of the few prefaces to economic democracy our now-powerless unions had once managed to win. Our confinement is ensured, not just by our cowardice but by the invisible but inescapable cage of total surveillance: the electronic barbed wire that has reduced our entire planet to a monstrous concentration camp.
¶Cast off as “surplus human capital” when we are deemed no longer exploitable for profit, we are then methodically exterminated. We are slaughtered as cannon-fodder in the empire's endless wars of profit and conquest; we are murdered by the bullets and truncheons of the federalized and militarized local police; we are fatally poisoned by Capitalism's malignant toxification of our environment; we are slain by denials of health care and social services that are in fact deliberate, euphemism-cloaked policies of slow-motion genocide.
¶Meanwhile our overlords pornographically multiply their own wealth by knowingly destroying the planetary conditions upon which all sentient life depends. More recently – as if to demonstrate the infinite magnitude of their Evil by provoking unsurvivable thermonuclear apocalypse (and not coincidentally in fulfillment of a malevolent scheme by Adolf Hitler himself) – they have imposed on the Ukraine the anti-Russian war-mongering and anti-Jewish violence of an avowedly Nazi puppet government. And now, in the person of Donald Trump and his appointees, the USian tyrannosaur has come home to gorge on its final and terminally ironic meal, the denizens of Moron Nation itself, the people who by their prideful ignorance and hatefulness loosed this demonically insatiable monster on the entire world.
But in these times our ability to effectively resist is obstructed not only by the USian regime of inescapable surveillance, but by the dreadful undertow of Moron Nation's intellectual and psychological paralysis: the deliberate deceptions and outright ignorance fostered by the Capitalist “education” system; by Capitalism's “mainstream media” propaganda machine (which is owned by the same smirking plutocrats whose vassal politicians so gleefully oppress us); and by the physical and psychic terrorism of Capitalism's manufactured crises.
¶Yet resist we must. As always, art – sometimes even unwittingly – depicts our present circumstances and so foretells our future. And as it says in a breathtakingly apt, wrenchingly poignant anthem grown increasingly popular far beyond its video-game origin, “shadows fall and hope is gone; steel your heart; the dawn will come.”

"...our relentless subjugation by capitalism..."We the People have been reduced to slavery and serfdom by Capitalist governance -- absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression for all the rest of us -- and the CIA's Operation Chaos exemplifies Capitalism's darkest and most malevolent aspects.

These are some of the very few photographs that survived the 1983 fire that destroyed my life's work, not just most of my pictures but nearly all my writing including two books in progress and all the associated research. Some of these photos shown here escaped the flames because they were with me in my portfolio case; others were produced digitally from negatives dug out of the rubble a year later. The images of obvious print-quality were made on DuPont Varilure paper, which had the highest silver content of all commercial papers and thus produced such intense tonalities, they often seemed illuminated by their own internal light sources. But that sort of photographic quality is now forever beyond our common reach, either gone like Varilure or so prohibitively expensive it is available only to the obscenely pampered dilettantes who produce the aesthetic pabulum favored by the One Percent. Photography as I knew it is dead -- as dead as my career was after the fire and its ensuing clinical depression -- but this body of work provides a glimpse of what was lost and what might have been. All photos copyright Loren Bliss.

In photography, a sandwich is a collage made by printing two or more negatives simultaneously. Collage is a medium that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember -- probably since I was a child experimenting with finger paints, glue and newspapers -- but I never took it seriously until, sometime in my early 20s and still thinking myself a painter-to-be, I discovered the works of Jasper Johns. Now it seems to me making sandwiches is to conventional photography what poetry is to prose: not just an intellectual exercise, but the opening of a doorway to the Mysterious Otherness I know as the Muse, from whom (sometimes in fulfilment of that McLuhanesque notion of art as prophecy) the currents of real creation invariably flow, whether swift and startling as a lightening strike or slow and soft as cottonwood seeds adrift on subtle summer air. (Collage and photographic sandwiches copyright Loren Bliss 2009-2012.)

When I returned to New York City in 1965 I was immediately impressed by the contrast between the graffiti I had encountered "out in America" -- the South and Middle West -- and what I saw in Manhattan. While the form and content of graffiti is sociologically important – possibly a semiotic indicator without peer -- I found the graffiti of Manhattan singularly appealing, the intellectual and aesthetic equivalents of a long-overdue breath of fresh air, and within a few days I had begun documenting it with 35mm and 120 film. (The opening photograph of this series was obviously made far from Manhattan, but I included it to establish an essential contrast.) Many more details about this particular body of work, which I briefly resumed when I went back to the City again in 1983, then abandoned after that year's career-terminating fire, are in my post of January 7, 2010. Yes I regard the best urban graffiti as genuine art, but too much of it, alas, is nothing more than a human variant on the mammalian practice of marking territory with spurts of urine: "I wuz here." All photos by Loren Bliss, copyright dates as noted.

Supporters of health care reform and a much smaller number of health care reform's opponents -- each faction identified by its picket-signs -- gathered for the "town hall" meeting called by U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) in Lakewood on August 25, 2009. Originally set for Lakewood City Hall, the event was rescheduled and moved to Lang Stadium to accommodate an unprecedented mobilization of pro-reform people. Cops estimated the crowd at about 2500. Photos by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.

Best Site for Suppressed Assassination FactsThe late Mae Brussell was our most relentless researcher into the murder of President John Kennedy and many other such outrages. Her legacy is a damning list of the USian Empire's darkest secrets.

Best, Most Thorough Documentation on the CIA's Destruction of the 1960s Counterculture Ms. Brussel outdid herself in her nobody-dares-publish-it investigative report exposing how the CIA's Operation Chaos destroyed the 1960s Counterculture. (My assumption is the Agency, with its Ivy-League analysts and their knowledge of pagan mythology, recognized the Counterculture's anti-patriarchal, resurrection-of-the-Goddess direction, understood it as a far greater threat to Capitalism than Marxism and responded with the murderous efficiency inherited from Gestapo predecessors.)

Communist Labor Party Communism as it is evolving in the United States after the murder of the American Dream and the slaying of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy.

Consortium News Superb reporting and analysis. Founder/Editor Robert Parry exposed Reagan's Iran-Contra scheming and has been persecuted by the capitalists ever since.

der SpiegelMainstream German newspaper that is often a valuable source of news about Western European politics.

Global ResearchA genuinely independent news site -- neither definitively Left nor Right -- that often covers stories suppressed by U.S. Mainstream Media, which (let us never forget), is owned by the same One Percenters who own the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties and thereby control all U.S. governance at every level.

Gun Owners of America Fanatically hard-Right (and often ChristoFascist as well), it is nevertheless the best source for information about the One Percent's efforts to forcibly disarm the U.S. 99 Percent.

International Marxist Archive All of Marxism's defining texts defiantly uploaded to the Internet by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as its final contribution to humanity's eternal struggle for economic democracy -- without which there is no democracy at all.

RTFormerly "Russia Today," it accurately covers U.S. news the "mainstream media" propaganda machine routinely suppresses. Its notable work includes the nation's best coverage of the Occupy Movement (2011-2012), and the ongoing struggles of Black Lives Matter, Water Protectors and other such groups against the Empire's now-openly-fascist policies of homeland governance.

Second Amendment FoundationUnmistakably conservative, it is also the best source on legal action in defense of our right to keep and bear arms.

Socialist Worker Best Marxist website in the United States (never mind its purely ideological essays reflect only Leon Trotsky's viewpoint), with news reporting and analysis that is far superior to anything fed us by capitalism's "mainstream media" propaganda machine.

Southern Poverty Law CenterBest source of information on the burgeoning plague of Nazi, ChristoFascist and KuKluxKlan-type hate groups in the USian imperial homeland.

Theocracy WatchCornell University's in-depth source on the escalating campaign to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the USian Homeland. It is flawed only by its refusal to recognize the Democratic (sic) Party's mostly clandestine collaboration with the openly theocratic Republicans -- a collaboration revealed in frightening detail by Jeff Sharlet's "The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" (Harper: 2008).

Unless otherwise noted, all material herein is copyrighted by Loren Bliss and/or Dispatches from Dystopia. Reproduction for non-profit purposes is permitted as long as it identifies the author or photographer and includes a link to the original text. To arrange for-profit reproduction, contact Loren Bliss via the comment facility.

11/29/2016

Beyond the Newest Squabbles of the Two Evils, a (Very) Faint Possibility Sanders Might Emerge as the Perfect Compromise

JILL STEIN'S EFFORT TO nullify the 2016 presidential election by last-minute recounts reeks of Green Party naivety, typically dishonest Democratic (sic) Party sleight-of-hand and the sinister guile for which Hillary Clinton is rightfully infamous. In all probability, Stein is Hillary's figurehead, positioned to be the perfect scapegoat for the debacle that will inevitably follow if this newest campaign to monkeywrench Donald Trump's victory is even half as effective as Hillary's felonious suppression of Sen. Bernie Sanders' candidacy.

Properly cynical analysis of the Stein campaign – Stein's relative innocence and limited finances as opposed to Hillary's bottomless corruption and obscenely unlimited wealth – indicates it can hardly be anything but another Clinton operation. In any case it has turned a long-cliched Madison Avenue hyperbole into new reality. Advertisers often boast their product “changes everything,” but this is precisely the outcome the breathtakingly Machiavellian recount-ploy will have if it triumphs, which several sources say is highly probable. For this “everything” truly is everything – not just the hitherto-certain, now unnervingly dubious outcome of the election, but the now equally dubious longevity of our nation, our species and our planet.

As I have said for months, the actual choice allowed us by our capitalist overlords – minor parties, write-ins, incomplete ballots and hell-no-I-won't-vote abstentions aside – was between two latter-day Hitlers and the horrific agenda each represents: the new Holocaust as promised by Donald Trump; the attack on Russia and the resultant thermonuclear apocalypse as sought by Hillary Clinton. In other words, we were forced to choose between possibly survivable horrors versus absolutely certain extinction.

Obviously exploiting Stein as her puppet – and obviously both as Stein's financier and puppet-master (diabolical, yes, especially in its multiple betrayals, but nevertheless the only conclusion allowed by logic) – Hillary is timing the recount to invalidate enough electoral votes to deny Trump the presidency and possibly – depending on whether the Democratic (sic) election-fixing apparatus can alter recount results as efficiently as it killed Sen. Sanders' primary victory – give it to herself.

Here's how it might work:

As The Hill reports, failure to complete an official recount by the federal 13 December deadline probably nullifies the state's electoral votes. Rightist websites – in this instance to be believed – are already saying Stein's belated filing of the recount demands is intended to ensure the three states' miss the 13 December deadline, thereby subtracting their electoral votes from Trump's total and throwing the presidential election into the House of Representatives. (Apologetic note: this link to Inquisitr.com,, which summarizes the associated arithmetic, is obnoxiously clogged by advertisement monitoring and takes at least five minutes to stabilize to readability.)

What would happen were the presidency to be decided by the Republican-ruled House remains to be seen. There are at least three possibilities: that it confirms Trump's election; that it finds another Republican whose domestic Nazism is perhaps more closeted than Trump's but who will obey with absolute reliability the One Percent's global-conquest mandates Trump seems to opposes; or that it will find a compromise candidate acceptable to both parties – a possibility no less remote than Alpha Centauri, but one that nevertheless could put the hugely popular Sen. Sanders in the White House. (You read it first here.)

But let us not forget the recounts could also reverse enough votes to give Hillary the presidency. Thus she would seize the White House after having positioned Stein and the Green Party as the immediate scapegoat for the civil war that is certain to result. Meanwhile who can doubt the recount is yet another product of Hillary's limitless vindictiveness? As I said before, Stein not only lacks the requisite malice, but – without Hillary's clandestine intervention – it's gravely doubtful she'd have been able to access the requisite wealth. Cynicism – which sometimes is the most revealing Muse of all – suggests only two possibilities: that Hillary has blackmailed Stein into becoming her figurehead, or that Stein's ambitions have reduced her to Hillary's sacrificial lamb and turned her into another of the Clintons' useful idiots. (Wikileaks: please tell all!)

As to the danger of civil war, the KuKlux/Christian/Nazi militias have already threatened to rise in armed rebellion if Trump is denied the presidency. They would be even more enraged were Trump's ouster – seemingly accomplished by the same typical Democratic (sic) deviousness that invariably spares the Clintons from prosecution despite their brazen criminality – to succeed in putting Hillary in the White House.

Unfortunately, and just as I have written elsewhere, the violence of a second civil war would kill forever the nonviolent revolution now brewing at Standing Rock, which is fast evolving the potential of mobilizing sufficient overseas support to succeed much as Gandhi's revolution did against the British Empire in India. But with the nonviolent revolution aborted by unrelated violence, the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals could rest in absolute certainty the nonviolent threat to capitalist governance was permanently terminated even as the government's technological superiority was ensuring the defeat of the Rightist militias.

Moreover, a second civil war (perhaps labeled by future historians “the War of Presidential Succession”), would – under the unlimited powers Obama has bequeathed the presidency – allow declaration of a permanent state of emergency, thereby nullifying what little remains of the Constitution and ensuring the eternal omnipotence of capitalist tyranny.

Were Hillary the president, it would also facilitate her most cherished domestic ambition: zero-tolerance forcible disarmament – confiscation without compensation of every civilian-owned firearm in the United States.

Hillary would ultimately blame Russia for the millions of deaths and millions of dollars of damage so inflicted, whether by civil war, forcible disarmament or both. She would no doubt claim it was all the result of some alleged Kremlin conspiracy involving Trump, Stein, the Greens and Vladimir Putin – thereby giving herself a “nothing-to-lose” rationale for nuking Moscow and triggering thermonuclear apocalypse.

As to why Hillary would do anything so obviously suicidal, there are only two possible answers.

(I apologize for the above paragraph's link-heavy text. But now with the growing likelihood Hillary Clinton will be the next USian president – remember how she stole the primary from Sen. Sanders – I think it vital for us to recognize what a JesuNazi she truly is, and that once she is in the White House, she is likely to attack the remnants of the First Amendment at least as vindictively as we know she will attack the Second Amendment.)

The other possible explanation for Hillary's obvious intent to start World War III – an explanation that does not negate the first possibility (and could in fact be the expression of its Noah's Ark intent) – is that the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals have secretly built and stocked a vast subterranean network of bunkers to allow themselves and a few carefully chosen and meticulously bred slaves to survive a 25-year nuclear winter. Rumors of such refuges have persisted for years, and knowing our overlords' genocidal contempt for all the rest of us, we the people of the 99 Percent, I cannot doubt the rumors are founded on truth. Thus the plutocrats, their children and their slaves – the slaves no doubt dark-pigmented for easy identification – would emerge from these latter-day Noah's Arks as unchallenged rulers of a planet “cleansed” of all “sinful” humans and, not coincidentally, also healed of global warming.

In this context, let us further examine what might be the hidden agenda of the recount.

As I said above, on 8 November 2016 we were forced to choose between two Hitlers: Donald Hitler of the Renewed Holocaust versus Hillary Hitler of the Thermonuclear Apocalypse. But ultimately our choice was between (possibly survivable) horror or (certain) extinction. And our decisions revealed to the One Percent's psychological warfare experts the magnitude of our national courage.

The courageous – those of us who dared vote against Hillary (whether by voting for Trump or one of the lesser alternative-party candidates) – voted to gamble on the likelihood of survival and thus to fight on.

But those who voted for Hillary chose thermonuclear suicide. Some chose suicide because their fanatical Christianity convinced them they were better dead than Red – “Red” in this instance encompassing not only the uncertainties of socialist revolution (as by the nonviolence of Standing Rock), or at the very least the long-overdue rejection of Prosperity Gospel Christianity, the consequence implicit in Senator Sanders's efforts to resurrect the New Deal. Others chose suicide because they are terrified by the prospect of life on a planet undergoing terminal climate change or in a nation in which people – especially Working Class people – are allowed to own firearms. Still others – perhaps the moronic majority of Hillary's voters – chose suicide out of Moron Nation ignorance – ignoring all the damning evidence of Hillary's closet fascism and attachment to theocracy, and remaining in clinical denial of Hillary's ever-escalating threats, whether against any remnants of USian civil liberties or against Russia and ultimately against human survival.

In any case, the fact Hillary is winning the popular vote – overwhelmingly so, if the latest figures are to be believed – also tells the psychological warfare experts Moron Nation is already significantly subjugated, too cowardly to alter the status quo save by imposing forcible disarmament – that is, mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – on all civilian firearms owners.

Even so, what might the One Percent and its Ruling Class hope to accomplish by forcing a recount and at the very least nullifying the election? Is the One Percent perhaps still indecisive about which Hitler will serve it best as Führer? Or is something else afoot – say deliberate provocation of a Rightist uprising, with civil war its inevitable result.

To reiterate: civil war would kill forever the potentially successful nonviolent revolution taking shape at Standing Rock. And – again reiterating – the resultant “state of emergency” would enable the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals to terminate – also forever – any rational hope of ever restoring USian liberty. Plus – last reiteration – a civil war's destruction, its magnitude akin to that of Germany in 1945, would give the Hillary the perfect “nothing-to-lose” rationale for starting World War III.

Think, people. We are tyrannized by Evil, our species' most diabolical plotters ever.

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THE FOLLOWING ARE the titles and links that were part of the blog post I had written for OAN before the news of the recount literally changed everything. The material – most of it about the transition to overt Nazism that would have occurred under Trump – is still relevant. But it is way too lengthy to add to the above, so I am reducing it to a recommended reading list, with the briefest possible notes about content and whether I commented on the associated discussion thread.

Fascism in Donald Trump's United States (Henry A. Giroux): Trump's comments form a discourse of hate, bigotry and exclusion...resonating deeply in a landscape of U.S. culture and politics crafted by 40 years of conservative counterrevolution...We heard this same hatred in the words of Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet and other demagogic orators who have ranted against Jews, communists and other alleged “infidels.” (No comment by LB.)

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Honor Roll Student Shares Fruit With Classmate, Gets Suspended for Violating Weapons Policy: An honor roll student...shared part of her lunch with a classmate. The school suspended her for six days...after she cut a peach in half with a child’s butter knife...The Pembroke Pines Police Department said it has turned over their investigation to the State Attorney’s Office. (No comment by LB.)

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His horror show hides Clinton's rotten agenda (Elizabeth Schulte and Alan Maass): Donald Trump is so despicable that no one is paying attention to what Hillary Clinton actually stands for. (No comment by LB.)

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Goodbye, American Neoliberalism. A New Neo-Fascist Era Is Here (Cornel West):(T)he abysmal failure of the Democratic party to speak to the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people unleashed a hate-filled populism and protectionism that threaten to tear apart the fragile fiber of what is left of US democracy. And since the most explosive fault lines in present-day America are first and foremost racial, then gender, homophobic, ethnic and religious, we gird ourselves for a frightening future. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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President Obama's Last Stand (Matt Taibbi): As Taibbi often does, he buried his lead, probably in embarrassment: ...There are a lot of people these days wondering if the election of the race-baiting Donald Trump will end up staining or outright repudiating the legacy of Barack Obama. I think it will be the other way around. Trump's presidency is almost sure to throw the best qualities of this unique and powerful historical figure into relief. (Brief comment by LB.)

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Obama Refuses to Pardon Edward Snowden. Trump's New CIA Pick Wants Him Dead (Alex Emmons and Naomi LaChance): President Obama indicated on Friday that he won’t pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even as President-elect Donald Trump announced his pick to run the CIA: Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo, who has called for “the traitor Edward Snowden” to be executed. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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7 Big Areas Where Jeff Sessions Could Change Policy at DOJ (Danny Vinik): Sen. Jeff Sessions was an instantly divisive figure when President-elect Donald Trump named him as his next attorney general: conservatives and immigration hardliners welcomed the choice, while civil-rights groups and Democrats spent the day attacking the pick...the critics’ focus was on controversial past comments by Sessions, such as accusations that he said the NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union were “un-American,” and joked that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “OK, until I learned they smoked pot.” But much of the concern is what he’d actually do as AG: that he’d undermine civil rights protections, prosecute more undocumented immigrants and allow companies to go wild with mergers...Here are seven areas where Sessions could most dramatically change public policy. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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Life Under Trump (Rebecca Gordon): Can we hold back the rising seas that are already closing over island nations on a planet where Donald Trump promises to abandon the fight against climate change and walk away from the historic Paris climate accord? And...(j)ust how vulnerable are we, two middle class white lesbians in our sixties, during a Trump presidency? (Brief comment by LB.)

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Here's What We Do Now - a Personal Note (Greg Palast):Decades of progress created with sweat and determination face destruction. Within the next six months, we may see the Voting Rights Act repealed—and civil rights set back 50 years; the entirety of our environmental protection laws burnt in a coal pit; police cruelty made our urban policy; the Education Department closed to give billionaires a tax holiday; and a howling anti-Semite as White House Senior Counselor. But the horror we face is countered by this one hard and hopeful fact: Donald Trump did NOT win this election. (Brief comment by LB.)

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Medics Describe How Police Sprayed Standing Rock Demonstrators With Tear Gas and Water Cannons (Alleen Brown): (T)he Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council...estimated that 300 people were treated for injuries, including 26 who were taken to area hospitals. (Brief comment by LB.)

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War Has Broken Out in North Dakota (Marc Ash):The situation in North Dakota at the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline has degenerated into what can now only fairly be described as a war zone. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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IN SUCH TERRIBLE times as these I am occasionally asked what weird insight or sickness of imagination enables me to (accurately) portray our capitalist overlords as they truly are – that is, as boundlessly more cunning (and therefore infinitely more Evil) – than any diabolical creature ever conceived by the authors of the Torah, the Bible, the Qur'an or even the far more ancient and dreadful Chaldean catalogue of demons.

But if I am asked this same how-do-you-do-it question by someone with whom I am already psychologically comfortable, I might, if there is time, explain it as the hidden blessing of my childhood, which was all the more miserable for the absence of physical evidence that hid its unhealable gashes of psychological trauma. So wounded was I that even now on adult word-association tests I equate “family” with “betrayal” and “deception” and “scapegoating” and “rejection” and “despair.” Thus the microcosm of family brutality prepared me – quite thoroughly in fact – to cope with our species-wide macrocosm of bottomless Evil.

Evil is in fact humanity's default reality. (I capitalize it not for theological reasons – I am an ever-more-devoutly skeptical agnostic – but to provide the proper literary emphasis due what is undeniably our sole defining quality, intellect and soul alike, if indeed the latter is more than hallucination.) Nor will I debate my admittedly misanthropic conclusion; it has been confirmed more times than I can count, proven far more conclusively by what I've witnessed done to others than by what was ever done to me, whether during my first 18 years, or my award-winning but grievously underpaid and overworked decades as a journalist and social-documentary photographer, or now finally in my final seasons as a crippled old man with a failing heart, no longer exploitable for capitalist profit and thus like everyone else in such circumstances knowingly, deliberately, maliciously sentenced to death by the slow but methodically certain genocide of ever-deeper cuts to Medicare and food-stamps and Social Security and any other programs on which we depend for survival. Such is the quintessential Evil of Homo sapiens sapiens: Evil as it was in the beginning, Evil as it is now and Evil as it ever shall be, Evil without end amen.

Thus the one truly vital lesson to be gleaned from life is to learn to beware our species' penchant for perverting our most hypothetically exalted principles into real-time rationales for mass murder as at Wounded Knee and Mai Lai, mayhem as in Birmingham or at Standing Rock, and the sort of sadism the invading Germans sometimes inflicted on Russian children: bloating their bowels with gasoline enemas, lighting matches to their petrol-leaking anuses, then – much as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cackled at Qaddafi's execution by anal impalement – chortling with glee at the children's shrieking, running, sometimes exploding and always indescribably agonized deaths. Thus do the ubermenschen – our “brightest and best” – behave toward those of us they damn as untermenschen. Such is the Evil that defines our species.

Merry Christmas, Happy Easter, and here's a thermonuclear egg to brighten your basket. Our Evil demonstrably exceeded our ability at self-control when we nuked Japan to terrify our then-ally Josef Stalin and serve him notice that henceforth we'd be his deadliest enemy, far deadlier than the Germans his Red Army had just defeated. Now – thanks to this election and its aftermath – no matter its outcome our Evil will almost certainly overwhelm any possibility we might have escaped it.